by Tom Bissell
It turned out that Andrei had once worked as a translator for a pornographic Web site owned by the Kyrgyz man. That the thin, balding, deracinated ghoul I had just met was a pornographer did not at all surprise me. Andrei described the man’s latest venture: buying apartments all around Bishkek for his stable of Webcam girls to live in and occasionally diddle themselves for an attentive regional audience. “It’s been very successful,” Andrei said. So why did the man seem to dislike Andrei so much? “I quit working for him last year, and I was his best, most reliable producer. It’s not so simple to explain in English why I quit. I guess I would say my soul was being killed? Is that right? Can I say that?”
Yes, I told him. He could say that.
“I got really good at writing porn,” Andrei went on. “I would simply steal stories from English-language Web sites and translate them into Russian, with certain…adjustments, since there are some cultural differences, you understand. For the first five months, it was a lot of fun, and I made a lot of money, both for him and myself. Unfortunately, for the next five months, I wanted to die.”
We entered Sergei’s apartment building, which like all Soviet apartment buildings resembled a fissiparous block of concrete with rows of windows chiseled into it. Sergei, who lived on the third floor, must have seen us coming down the street, for when we turned on the third-story corner of his walk-up, he was standing in the jamb of his apartment’s open door with a shy smile on his face. One side of his head had been gulagishly shaved, and his chin and jawline were covered in fresh cuts that glistened like tiny bloodred berries. Sergei looked as though he had fallen out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Actually, he looked as if he had barely survived his fall from a Dostoyevsky novel. The cuts on his face were the result of a tumble he had taken on his bicycle a few hours before. The haircut, I eventually gathered, was just general Sergei weirdosity. “Please, please,” he said, “come in.”
He apologized for the mess, even though his apartment was not messy. He was living here alone, he said, while he and his wife worked out some “problems.” Andrei was translating by now, because 70 percent of everything Sergei said was an enigmatic mixture of Russian and English. From the gleam in his zirconium eyes, it was clear that Sergei had spent a large portion of the day drinking.
We walked into his living room. A soft monastic chant was playing from a small Russian-made boom box. Sergei asked me if I liked the music. I said I did. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as though relearning the meaning of each word on the fly: “I enjoy. The meditative music.” Sergei had a yoga mat in the middle of his living room floor, which was not something you typically saw in Central Asia. I asked about it, too. “Yes,” Sergei said. “I enjoy the yoga. However. Here it is forbidden. For Christians. This is true. For America, too. Yes?”
“I think,” I said, now speaking as slowly and deliberately as Sergei. “That very conservative American Christians. Discourage yoga. But for most Christians. I do not believe. It is a problem.”
Sergei tsk-ed. “The Russian monks think yoga is…” He looked over at Andrei and asked him to supply a certain English word.
Andrei did so: “Pagan.” Stress on the first syllable.
Sergei looked back at me. “The Russian monks. Think yoga. Is pagan.” Stress on the second syllable.
I asked Sergei what he did for a living.
“I am English teacher.” When Sergei smiled, I realized I, too, was allowed to smile at the thought of this man teaching English. Sergei put up his hands in mock surrender. “So yes. Maybe I don’t speak so good. But I read very well. I understand okay.”
“Sergei speaks five languages,” Andrei, who spoke merely three, said.
Sergei had another thing you rarely saw in private Central Asian homes: bookshelves bowed with the weight of something other than the leather-bound collected works of the same five Russian titans. Sergei had actual paperbacks worn from consultation, as well as several dozen hardcovers. I saw titles in English, Russian, French, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek. “I read more books,” Sergei said, as I looked his library over, “than any professor in Bishkek.” Just today Sergei had purchased a new Russian translation of the New Testament, which he showed me and which, as I paged through it, allowed me to marvel anew at the fascinating, transgalactic-warlord wrongness of the Russian word for God: Bog. Sergei was proudest, however, of his one-hundred-year-old Slavonic Bible, which no one was allowed to touch, lest it disintegrate further. It was a gift, Sergei said, from a Russian monk who was much beloved by him. When he tried to describe their relationship, he again had to consult Andrei.
“Mentor,” Andrei said.
“Yes. My mentor. Please, please, come to kitchen.”
On Sergei’s kitchen table were several small sacks of spices and herbs. Some, he said, were from Afghanistan, some from Chechnya, some from Ingushetia, some from Siberia, and some from the slopes of Kyrgyzstan’s Tien Shan Mountains. He sliced up an apple (“Kyrgyzstan has. The most delicious apples. In the world”) and boiled water for tea. The apple slices were, as promised, delicious, and I was reminded how much I missed Central Asian melon and fruit. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan in the mid-1990s and, in the early years of the twenty-first century, frequently traveled back and forth to Uzbekistan as I wrote my first book.
Everything in Sergei’s sad, tidy little apartment had a double function: his hot plate was also his water boiler, his kitchen table was also his ironing board, his couch was also his bed, his vodka glasses were also his tea cups. As he handed me my tea (also delicious, and flavored with a clove-like herb he claimed was a family secret), I realized how hungry for conversation and company this lonely, brittle man was. We sat down in his shadowy living room, while outside the orange light of dusk was turning soft and shaggy. Next to where I sat, Sergei had a framed picture of Tsar Nicholas II and his daughters, which I made the mistake of asking him about. While Andrei sighed, Sergei lamented the many crimes of the Bolshevik Revolution, the most devious of which, he said, was the murder of Nicholas, whom Sergei described as the greatest, noblest defender Russia and Russian Christianity ever had.*1 Sergei said he wept when the bones of Nicholas and his family were finally interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998; he wept again, he said, two years later, when the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas. Sergei spent the next twenty minutes describing his monastery outside Moscow, which he said was the most beautiful place in the world—or at least the most beautiful place he had seen. (“Maybe,” he said, “California is more beautiful.”) His monastery allowed him pure study, pure meditation. This I believed. The spiritual traditions of Russian Orthodoxy are not distinguished by their openness to novelty. Insight came through careful—one might even say slavish—adherence to established rituals and thought patterns.
“When will you return to your monastery?” I asked Sergei.
“Next summer,” he said. Which could not come soon enough. Whenever he was in Bishkek, he said, he drank too much and pined after too many women.
“You are a man of big dreams,” Andrei said, “and big appetites.” Then he repeated this in Russian.
An abashed Sergei shook his head. “Yes. This is true, unfortunately.” Then he looked at me. “Are you Catholic?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you Christian?”
“I’m not.”
He looked accusingly over at Andrei, as though he had been misled by him, and turned back to me. “But Andrei say. You seek Matthew.”
“ ‘Seek’ isn’t really the word I’d use. What I’d like to do is see the remains of the monastery where Matthew’s relics were supposedly kept.”
“Why do you want this?” he asked, puzzled.
“I’m writing a book about the tombs of the Twelve Apostles.”
Nodding gravely, Sergei took this in. “And how did you learn of this monastery?”
Andrei’s translation services went into overdrive as I described how, in 2006, while living in Rome, I saw a BBC piece on
line about an archaeologist named Vladimir Ploskih, an ethnic Russian of Kyrgyz citizenship who…But Sergei stopped me. Yes, yes. He knew all about Ploskih, a member in good standing of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences. Sergei also knew about the so-called Catalan Atlas, which was created in the late fourteenth century by apparently Jewish cartographers in Majorca, Spain. The atlas, which had many legendary flourishes, placed at “Ysikol” (obviously Issyk-Kul) something it called “the monastery of Armenian Brotherhood,” within which, purportedly, the relics of Matthew were once placed. Ploskih claimed to have unearthed not only portions of this monastery but also evidence of a more ancient settlement, all of which was underwater. Among Ploskih’s smaller discoveries were a Christian tombstone with an Uighur inscription and a piece of pottery decorated with what he described as a Star of David–like shape, which he interpreted as possible evidence of ancient Jewish or Jewish Christian activity in the area.
As I sat in Rome, the whole thing sounded far-fetched, but I nonetheless tracked down Ploskih’s e-mail and wrote him a letter in English in which I expressed my hope to join him as a journalist on his next expedition to the area. I received back a short letter, in Russian, from one of Ploskih’s assistants, politely declining. I later learned that the expedition was not state funded; rather, it was overseen by a few professional historians and archaeologists but was mostly staffed by passionate local history buffs.
That Christians existed in some number throughout Asia and Central Asia during medieval times, up to and around the fourteenth century, is undeniable. That the forces of Armenian Christianity launched a far-flung missionary effort is also fairly well established. (Armenian missionaries are believed to have initially Christianized Iceland, of all places.) That Ploskih’s expedition discovered some kind of underwater archaeological marvel in the waters of Issyk-Kul was also clear, even though it had nothing to do with ancient Christianity. Nevertheless, the Catalan Atlas was the only shred of historical evidence that placed an ancient Armenian monastery on the shores of Issyk-Kul. That such an anomalous place could have remained completely hidden until 2006 seemed unlikely. I thus asked Sergei, who had read so many books, if he gave the legend of the Monastery of Armenian Brotherhood any credence.
Instead of answering, he said, “You know there was other monastery there. Russian monastery.” As Sergei elaborated on this, he switched over to Russian, and Andrei began a running translation: “Okay, so he’s saying that an Orthodox monastery, a Russian monastery, was built, at the order of the tsar, on the shore of Issyk-Kul, in the late nineteenth century, very close to where the Armenian monastery is supposed to be. And he’s saying this monastery was built because, you see, the Russians back then were very smart. They wanted to come into Central Asia, so they sent out their priests to build churches, seminaries, monasteries. That way, when the Muslims attacked Russian Christians, as the tsar knew they would, Russia had a justification to invade.”
“The French did the same thing in Southeast Asia,” I said. “Missionaries first, gunboats second.”
Then Sergei said, in English, “You know about the punishment squads?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What are they?”
Sergei was slumped back in his chair. Andrei listened to him drone on for a moment. “Yes, okay,” Andrei said. “I know about this, too. ‘Punishment squads,’ you see, were what the tsar called the Russian and Ukrainian soldiers he sent to Central Asia. And now Sergei’s saying that these punishment squads ‘disciplined’ all the naughty Kyrgyz who resisted.”
“Naughty Kyrgyz?”
“That’s what Sergei calls them. He says the punishment squads were prepared to rid the earth of all Uzbeks and Kyrgyz and Turkmen to make room for Russian people here, to make a second homeland. The only thing that saved the local people, Sergei says, was the Bolshevik Revolution. Without the revolution there would be no Kyrgyz anymore, and this would be Russian territory.”
I was quiet for a moment. “It sounds a little bit like ethnic cleansing. I’d think Sergei, as a Muslim, would be sensitive to that issue.”
When Andrei translated this, Sergei laughed and said something quick and dismissive. Andrei: “He says he doesn’t approve or disapprove. He says it’s simply history.”
“So what happened to this Russian monastery?”
Sergei talked on. “It was destroyed in 1916,” Andrei translated, “by Kyrgyz bandits. They killed all the monks but two. In Karakol, Sergei says, we can visit the Orthodox church and see a statue of Mary that was very dear to the monks there. Every year, he says, on the anniversary of the monastery’s destruction, the statue weeps tears of blood.” Andrei stopped translating, even though Sergei was still talking, and looked at me, obviously troubled. “Do you think it’s true?”
“What—about the blood-crying statue?”
“Yeah,” Andrei said.
I had already learned that Andrei was not a religious person, so I did not worry about offending him when I said that this blood-crying Mary statue was probably the opposite of true.
Sergei, who had finally stopped talking and was in the process of hand rolling a cigarette, asked what we were talking about. Andrei told him. Sergei lit up, took a meditative drag, and expelled some pungently cumulus smoke. He said, “You do not believe. The statue of Mary. Weeps blood.”
“Sorry,” I said. “But no. I don’t.”
Sergei frowned and ashed his cigarette into his empty tea glass. Once he got back to his monastery, he said, he would read up on the matter and get back to me.
II.
Legitimizing agents and locales were imagined to lurk behind the composition of the other gospels: Mark had Rome and Peter; Luke had Paul; and John had Ephesus. One would think that early Christians would have similarly wanted to know with whom the apostle and evangelist Matthew associated and where he decided to live. Yet tradition is largely silent on these points. As far as can be known, no early Christian community claimed Matthew as its founder. Matthew did not much register in the minds of the church fathers and barely stirred the imaginations of early Christian storytellers. Even the allegorical symbol assigned to Matthew the evangelist is a dreary tautology: while Mark gets to be symbolized by a lion, John by an eagle, and Luke by an ox, Matthew’s symbol is a man.*2
In their lists of the Twelve, Mark and Luke list merely Matthew’s name, but Matthew’s list refers to someone most translations render as “Matthew the tax collector,” which is probably why Matthew was eventually attached to the gospel that bears his name. In the ninth chapter, we find Jesus in Capernaum, the citizens of which he has recently astounded by healing a paralytic man. “As Jesus was walking along,” the gospel writer tells us, “he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.”
That Matthew was a tax collector is one of the oldest, strongest traditions about him. According to the scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, however, the Greek words ho telones, which are typically translated as “the tax collector” (and, in older translations, “the publican”), are not correct. The Greek term for “tax collector” never appears in the New Testament. Also mistaken is the popular image of Matthew as a quisling of the Roman Empire. What Matthew’s gospel technically indicates is not a tax collector but a toll collector or customs officer in charge of procuring what Fitzmyer describes as “indirect taxes”: tolls, tariffs, and customs on all goods passing by his booth in Capernaum.
Thanks to Julius Caesar, the “publican” model of Roman tax collection—whereby a moneyed member of the equestrian class squeezed provincial peasants for poll and land taxes—ceased to function within Palestine around 44 BCE. During the lifetime of Jesus, poll and land taxes in Judaea, Idumaea, and Samaria were collected by agents of the local prefect; indirect taxes such as tolls, tariffs, and customs, meanwhile, were administered by a chief toll collector who most likely came into his position by way of a public auction. What made this system so gapingly open to corruption was the Roman practice o
f compelling a chief toll collector to pay his jurisdiction’s expected taxes ahead of time, from his own pocket, which he then recouped via a network of toll and tax farmers who sat eagle-eyed in their tax booths, much like the Matthew of tradition. Anyone who actually lived in first-century Galilee would have regarded a toll collector as the creature of the local Jewish tetrarch Herod Antipas, not as an agent of the Roman occupation, which most Galileans could pretend did not affect them, as there is no record of a significant Roman military presence in Galilee until much later in the first century.
Mark’s and Luke’s accounts of the calling of the Capernaumian “tax collector” are similar to Matthew’s, but for one thing: in both accounts, the man Jesus calls is referred to as Levi. (Mark calls him “Levi son of Alphaeus,” indicating a familial connection to James son of Alphaeus that the later Luke chose to leave unnoted and unexplored.) All three accounts of the calling of Matthew/Levi are followed by a jump cut to a dinner party at which Jesus is the apparent guest of honor. Mark tells us that the party was held at Levi’s house and that “many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus—for there were many who followed him.” Somehow the local Pharisees get wind of this scandalous dinner party and ask Jesus’s disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus overhears the question and answers the Pharisees directly: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Meanwhile, in Luke’s version, Levi throws a “grand banquet” for Jesus “in his house,” at which “there was a great crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table.” Matthew’s account of the party does not mention it being thrown by the toll collector recently called by Jesus, but many of the elements in Mark and Luke are present.